The e-commerce industry continues to grow rapidly year over year, bringing more merchants online and driving larger profits. With that growth comes the increased need for rich content, innovative product merchandising, and integration into an ever increasing number of third party sales, marketing, and fulfillment tools. Drupal has always excelled as a platform for building unique customer experiences, and it continues to come into its own as an adaptive sales platform via projects like Drupal Commerce.

This track includes content that helps merchants understand how to start and grow their online businesses, demonstrates to developers how to build ambitious e-commerce sites, and incorporates solution providers who improve the whole process via integrations.

In the e-commerce track you will learn how to start to sell online, how to grow your existing business and reach a wider audience, and the best tools to use for developing your platform.

The track is focused on the following topics:

Drupal vs other e-commerce solutions: comparison, the cost of entry and scale

What competitive advantages does Drupal bring to online merchants?

What are the benefits of Drupal-native eCommerce solutions vs. integrating external systems?

Case studies for unique or ambitious implementations of Drupal for e-commerce

About industry tracks

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blog posts, industry verticals are a new concept being introduced at Drupal Europe and replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday. At Drupal Europe these industry verticals are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket and provide more opportunities to learn and exchange within the industry verticals throughout three days.

About the Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

With Drupal 8 core now in full swing and the contrib space rapidly maturing, it is an excellent time to get more deeply involved with one of the world’s largest open-source development communities. The Drupal + Technology track is focused on educating developers on the latest techniques and tools for increasing the quality and efficiency of their projects.

The Drupal + Technology track is the place for Drupal experts actively working on and contributing to Drupal to share their knowledge and help attendees to grow their Drupal skills.

We expect deeply technical sessions that inspire developers to see what is possible with Drupal. We welcome sessions sharing knowledge about integrating Drupal with bleeding-edge technologies (blockchain, IoT, decoupled frontend, etc) to empower the audience to create amazing digital experiences.

This year, the Drupal Europe program is designed around the idea of industry verticals with sessions and workshops based on specific industries. We expect a huge amount of session submissions in the Drupal + Technology track and would kindly advise you to look if an industry track could be more appropriate for your talk to have a better chance of being accepted.

Be ready to sharpen your skills and connect with other tech-minded folks. Convince your boss to invest in your skills, and get you a regular Drupal Europe ticket before they increase in price on 12th of August.

There will also be plenty of contribution opportunities during the event. All expertises and energy levels are equally invited!

The deadline for the call for papers is 30th of June. Share your skills and empower other developers at the Drupal + Technology track. Submit your session now!

About Drupal Europe 2018

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — with a 15 min direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 and will bring over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Drupal Europe brings a unique opportunity to connect, share and learn from the Drupal community and to talk about what holds us together. We grew to be the biggest open source community under the tagline “Come for the code and stay for the community” which we strive to uphold.

Join us on September 10–14, 2018 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss and learn about growing and strengthening communities and the challenges that come with that.

Drupal has been a historic example of how Open Source communities can thrive and to maintain this leading position we need to learn from each other, include others and inspire everybody to be an active contributor. This might bring its challenges from time to time, so please come and share your stories, expertise and lessons learned with us. This is the only way to keep our community strong, diverse and open minded.

Who should attend?

You! This vertical topic will be the meeting place for everyone in Drupal and other communities.

Whether you want to organise events, you’re new to the community and want to know where you can get involved, or you want to share a success story from your community, you are welcome.

Target groups:

Members of the Drupal community

Other open source communities

Organisations and those interested in how communities work and prosper

As you’ve probably read in one of our previous blog posts, industry verticals are a new concept being introduced at Drupal Europe and replace the summits, which typically took place on Monday. At Drupal Europe. These industry verticals are integrated with the rest of the conference — same location, same ticket and provide more opportunities to learn and exchange within the industry verticals throughout three days.

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering thousands of digital solutions around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — which has a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

We are organizing the biggest Drupal event in Europe in 2018 with a group of community volunteers in collaboration with the Drupal eV (German Drupal Association) and the Drupal Europe Foundation. We’d like to update you on our progress and turn to you for input.

Mark your calendars for September 10–14, 2018 when Drupal Europe will be held in the beautiful Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany. This is a great venue for the conference and only a 20 minutes’ drive from Frankfurt Airport. We just had our second walkthrough last week discussing details with the venue and were impressed.

Photo by Baddy Breidert @baddysonja

Buy your Early Supporter ticket now!

We are now selling Early supporter tickets for 380 EUR (including VAT). Only 300 of these tickets are available, and only for a limited time. Buy now at https://www.drupaleurope.org/#tickets

A new logo

Thanks to all designers we worked with who came up with such great ideas for our branding! We are delighted to release our final logo proudly crafted by sixeleven. Drupal Europe stickers (pictured here) will be available at various Drupal events where our team shows up in the coming months.

Latest on the conference schedule

We are continually looking at how to structure the biggest Drupal event in Europe, and based on exploratory discussions with community members, we believe we are on the right track.

First of all we strongly believe contribution is at the heart of the Drupal project. Figures show that over 44% of Drupal contributors are in Europe. Therefore, in our programme we want to give you more time to contribute by making both Monday and Friday contribution days (formerly called sprints). Mentors will be available on both days to help those new to Drupal contribution.

We are structuring the rest of the event between Tuesday and Thursday on the successful summit model that has worked well at the start of DrupalCons and other regional events. Topics will include government, education, publishing, technology, and community. We are looking for sponsors for each to make possible to put them on.

And the great news is that your single Drupal Europe ticket will give you access to all these workshops, panels and discussions.

We want to hear from you

Although we have plenty of ideas, we realize that this is your conference.

Please help us understand you, our audience, better by completing our survey. It should only take 8 minutes or so and still give us lots of valuable insight. While not all questions are mandatory, we added a few open questions to get to know you better.

Thank you, and please share our survey with all your Drupal friends and colleagues to help us make Drupal Europe a success.

Two weeks ago we published our first post to introduce ourselves to the Drupal community. Today we are back with the latest updates and also with several calls to action to everyone in the Drupal community. From the very beginning we stated that this is an event organised by the Drupal community, for the Drupal community, and this is a great opportunity to get involved.

In the meantime there are also a lot of behind the scenes tasks that we keep working on to make sure that Drupal Europe 2018 will actually happen. Here’s an overview of what we are currently working on:

Defining our internal roles & the leadership team.

Design branding materials.

Explore event ticketing systems.

Exploring payment gateways.

Investigating feasibility of using Kickstarter

Developing best-practices and various administrational templates which can be reused in the future.

Call for venues

No website or payment gateway will make the event happen alone though. The biggest outstanding question about Drupal Europe is location and timing and we need your help in moving forward on that.

Currently we are collecting data about possible venues in Europe. Is there a possible venue in your country that you could think of? Would you like to invite the Drupal community to your hometown? Let us know by simply answering several questions about the venue.

The more detail there is in the proposal the better we can compare the options.

We are not expecting you to organise the entire conference by yourselves or your local community, we are just looking for venues where our organisation could host Drupal Europe.

Currently we are aiming for a date between the end of August and the beginning of September 2018. We are planning to have the conference from Thursday to Saturday where we will have a sprint room, different session rooms, an exhibition hall for sponsors and the possibility to have our own catering services. Before the actual conference we will be hosting summits and optional two days of training beforehand.

Call for Swag

Drupal enthusiasts like their swag, and so do we. We thought it would be fun to put some creative minds on designing t-shirts, mugs and other cool swag that are all related to Drupal Europe 2018. We would love to see you involved!

Call for Designers

We’d love to have a lasting brand that does not need to be reinvented again if the event ever happens again in the future. So if you are, or if you know, a creative person or company who wants to contribute this and add “Designed the branding for Drupal Europe 2018” to their resume or portfolio, please do let us know via Twitter

With the 2014 European Drupal conference fast approaching, the Ixis team members attending this year have scoured the schedule for their must see see sessions this year, and why.

For the Developers

Content Staging in Drupal 8 (Wednesday 10:45) - moving content about from dev to production has always been a huge pain in Drupal, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see how this might work in Drupal 8 and finally put an end to the question of when and where the client should start adding their conent during the development phase.

Drupal's PHP Component Future (Wednesday 14:15) - we're already using and developing modules for our work with Codeception, so we would benefit from learning how this might apply to Drupal 8, or even 9.

A Decoupled Drupal with Silex (Thursday 14:15) - decoupling Drupal from the front end has been a topic for a few years now. Learn from others who have jumped on early and ironed out the development problems. Relevant to Drupal 7and 8.

Drupal 8 CMI on Managed Workflow (Wednesday 13:00) - as projects get more complex the pain of the Features module becomes well known, CMI holds much hope for the future of automated repeatable builds.

Future-Proof your Drupal 7 site (Wednesday 14:15) - Until Drupal 8 is out and under some real world use we can ensure our Drupal 7 development choices make the upgrade path less painful. We'll see what's in Drupal 8 and how that maps back to the available Drupal 7 modules that are currenly available.

Twig and the new Drupal 8 Theme System (Tuesday 10:45) as we all know Drupal 8 will be using a new theme system called Twig. This session should provide an insight into what to expect from a support point of view.

For Business Owners / Project Managers

Project Train Wrecks (Wednesday 14:15) promises to be an insight from other agencies on the problems faced and solutions to keep projects running smoothly.

There's plenty more to attend during the week to keep everybodies minds happy - the countdown to September 29th begins, and tickets are still available at the slightly discounted rate until September 16th.

The deadline to apply for scholarships for Drupal Developer Days in Barcelona is also next monday. Anyone who has not yet applied can do so online until April 30, 2012.

Our scholarship program provides financial support for Drupal developers, who would otherwise not be able to attend, so that they can participate in the Drupal Developer Days.
We provide this financial help for five participants.

Sponsors

We are still looking for companies and individuals that can sponsor the second edition of the European Drupal Developer Days that takes place on 15-17 June 2012 in Barcelona.

The event is the perfect opportunity to expose yourself to a technical minded audience and to show that you have a Druplicon-shaped heart.